10 coolest (mostly interactive) online maps of Philadelphia

This 1838 map of Philadelphia from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania didn't make our list of the 10 best maps of Philadelphia.

We love maps.

For hundreds of years, they have helped us better understand our world. That understanding has grown wildly with time and technology, but, still, maps help.

In a place as inwardly focused, we have plenty of maps in Philadelphia. You also may know that we have something of a technology community here.

So there are resources like the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access, or PASDA, which offers just a wild glut of GIS shape files for mapping geeks. We’ve seen cool mapping tools that are of broader scope though Philly got some love: from the addition of bicycle directions to Philadelphia Google Maps to the Google Building Maker to mapping the homes of those in the U.S. armed services who died in the Mideast this decade and many more.

But we wanted to highlight the coolest maps made for Philadelphia of Philadelphia.

Taking into account our own map obsessions, suggestions and calling out our community, we took on the task of listing, in no particular order, the 10 best online maps of Philadelphia.

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A case for the Historical Society’s Philly Web portal

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Since she was a young woman studying at Rutgers University, 67-year-old Donna Meidt has traced her family ancestry by collecting stories from relatives, studying history books, and visiting the small mountain village of Gasperina in Italy, where her great-grandparents began raising their family more than a century ago.

The focus of her life’s work has been on her grandfather, Antonio Nicola Pisano, who lived in Philadelphia’s Queen Village neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century. Meidt remembers vividly the stories that Pisano shared with her about the life and family he left behind. “They were artists and they were poets,” he often said.

Pisano immigrated to America in 1911 at the age of 16, moving into a boarding house at Fifth and Catherine streets. The young man studied as a shoemaker’s apprentice at a factory in Center City. But his passion, too, was the arts.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.